This invention relates to video surveillance and, in particular, to an apparatus and method of storing video data in a video surveillance system.
In today's security systems typically one or more guards monitor a series of cameras, looking for situations that are not part of the normally expected scenes. In many cases, the abnormal activities involve motion such as people running, cars speeding, erratic behavior of people, and so forth. With the recent newspaper accounts of terrorist bombings, security attention has expanded to include objects that may be abandoned in public places such as airports or cafes. An abandoned object is a potential threat that needs to be detected and addressed as quickly as possible. In addition, theft of property from unattended venues is another important task for today's security systems and security personnel. In this case, the removal of an object of value must be detected quickly if the unauthorized removal is to be prevented. All of these tasks are extremely difficult to visually monitor for long periods of time. Some prior art digital video recorders have been provided with software to analyze recorded video to detect abandonment or removal of an object; however, these analyses are generally not done in real-time. Moreover, with the large numbers of cameras that are typically monitored by security personnel, a centralized device such as a digital video recorder or other computing system cannot practically handle the volume of video data that has to be analyzed. Accordingly, there has been a long felt need for an economical way to detect motion, object abandonment and object removal in real-time.